


The Boy Who Danced

by ruby_powell



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dance movie AU, Fluff, Gen, dance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 11:17:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,425
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3325496
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruby_powell/pseuds/ruby_powell
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry couldn’t wait to shake off the dull ache of summer and stretch his feet and mind again at the Hogwarts Academy for Wizardry and the Terpsichorean Arts.</p>
<p>He's about to have the time of his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Boy Who Danced

Harry couldn’t wait to shake off the dull ache of summer and stretch his feet and mind again at the Hogwarts Academy for Wizardry and the Terpsichorean Arts. Though the cupboard under the stairs had cramped his young limbs, forcing him to limber up while propped at odd angles between a large hamper of Dudley’s baby things (“too precious to give away!” cooed Aunt Petunia) and a large dusty suitcase (“for my business travels!” harrumphed Uncle Vernon), and though he had been strictly forbidden from attending ballet lessons with his cousin, Harry had proven early in life that when it came to dance, he was one step ahead.

Let Duddlekins wear the softest leg warmers and stretch his stiff hamstrings ‘til his face turned blue. When Harry tossed his tangled dark hair back from his lightning scarred forehead, tucked his stomach, chest, and tailbone into an aligned pillar of long muscle and steely will, he was the essence of Tchaikovsky, a blur of lines and limbs that Balanchine would have drooled over. He had even once caught the eye of Magnifica DollFlower, the famous, aging virtuoso— _La Sorcière_ , she had been called in her youth—as he launched a _tour jeté_ from the top of a small flight of steps in front of a library. He hadn’t recognized her at the time, of course, though after clutching her foxfirefur wrap to her bosom she had clamped his chin in an iron grip and gazed deeply into his eyes for some moments, muttering “it can’t be,” and “such technique from one so young!” But Hermione had told him later who it must have been, impatiently dragging out her Tome of Accomplished Witches to make him look at high-speed photos from the 1920s in which Dollflower dashed and swooped and darted across tiny stages lit by wandlight and fireflies.

The lack of professional training had, of course, set Harry back a bit. The Weasley kids had all been doing serious synchronized tap routines since they could wobble around on two legs, as was evidenced by Molly’s many family portraits, replete with sequined jackets and top hats that sometimes exploded into sparklers (Fred and George’s nascent showmanship at work). What he lacked in vocabulary and precision, Harry made up for in shear determination and a natural, aching beauty that stretched out the length of his fingertips.

It helped, of course, that his mum and dad had been Lily and James Potter: No Finer Sight on Wizarding Ice. He still sometimes thought he remembered the green gauzy costumes that matched his mum’s eyes; the silvery flash of skate blades like a Patronus against the dark. Naturally, he took after them, even if he’d only been a baby when at their fourth Grand Prix the darkest, most dread athlete of them all, He Who Must Not Be Named, had skated onto the ice, wand drawn and eyes red as live coals in the middle of their triple lutz. When Harry thought of it, even now, he had to squinch his eyes together and rub his palm hard across the twinge that shot through his lightning scar. He might have been an infant, but he’d surely known injustice from the beginning—the deaths of his parents made even more bitter by the biased 2.5 on the card raised by Alonso Snap, the Death Eater judge.

Harry was also lucky, of course, that he had friends like Hermione to help him catch up. With her bushy brown hair tied back or braided in rows back from her forehead so that each braid caught and amplified the swing of her movement, Hermione made it her business to learn, practice, and perfect more kinds of dance than Harry had even known existed. She had been given a medal in their second year for dancing the Cumbia with Lavender Brown while holding Trevor airborne with a six-minute Levitation Charm. Hermione didn’t have Harry’s perfectly arched feet, but she did have better rhythm, and had spent multiple terms maddening the other Gryffindor girls in her tower by practicing drumming exercises late at night to hone her timing and syncopation.

And now the summer was finally ending, and Harry would be able to dance again. Really dance—not just the little twists and skips he managed in the kitchen or in the back garden, always afraid of Uncle Vernon suddenly rounding a corner and bellowing, as he had once, his mustache caught in the breeze of his shout, “Down! Stop it! Stop that—jumping! No boy could jump that high without using—arhgem! you know! Petunia! Petunia! Make him STOP!” Harry had grown up under the thumb of the Dursleys and had smarted for years against their old fashioned taste in theatrical movement and balletic grace, but that didn’t make it any less humiliating to be shown into the parlor the following afternoon and made to stand in a corner behind the sofa where his aunt and uncle sat breathlessly applauding and humming off-key in little fits and starts while Dudley demonstrated a ‘proper’ _saut de basque_.

Harry woke up before sunrise. Finally. It was finally the day. Hedwig was shifting her weight from side to side in her cage, hooting and beating her wings in expectation of the physical freedom they both craved. Harry did his lunges, _pliés_ , and neck stretches while he pulled his jeans and sneakers on, while he checked the latch on his tidily packed and already ready trunk. He spun a quick triple pirouette in the middle of his bedroom floor and ended facing the window, arms extended in an eager, breathless _port de bras_. It was finally time.

Platform 9¾ was a jumble of exuberant movement. Fred, George, and Lee Jordan had clearly spent the entire summer secretly arranging a flash mob of what seemed like hundreds of upper year students who swarmed over luggage carts and piles of suitcases gyrating, leaping, and kicking to the bass-heavy, amplified strains of “Rhythm is a Dancer.” Crabbe and Goyle were dancing an uncomfortable reunion tango under the nose of an impatient porter. Ginny Weasley had learned something new that involved running up a wall and flipping over to land on her father’s shoulders, though after she tried it a third time and accidentally ran right back out through the wall to platform 10, Molly took her hand firmly and insisted her daughter try a little foxtrot instead. Harry basked in it all: limbs flying everywhere! Muscles contracting, pushing feet across the pavement of the platform, rebounding off the side of the Hogwarts Express as it stood at the ready, the porter shaking his head and rolling his shoulders in a pop and lock shrug that became an elegant death drop when Lee Jordan dove face first over him from a hand trolley into an open train window.

Barely able to keep from giddy spinning, Harry felt two pairs of friendly hands swoop in under his arms and suddenly Ron and Hermione were carrying him down the platform, running as if they were glamorous gents in tails and he were Vera Ellen, descending a staircase on their arms in a spangled white dress. He tossed his face back, breathing in the train steam and freedom in the station air, locking his shoulders and pulling down his scapulae to provide a secure lifting spot for his friends. When they set him down, laughing and all talking at once, hugging and scrambling for their luggage through the crowd, Hermione in one ear explaining the superior heel design of her new flamenco shoe, and Ron boasting in the other about the night he and George taught the garden gnomes the Electric Slide, Harry finally felt at home. Back with his crew.

The silence on the platform was sudden but it took a minute to reach Harry: the subdued murmur and rustle of the crowd contracting away from a central point; the quiet taps and elbows and mutters, the flipping hips and tossed heads as the Slytherin Dance Team stalked out across the platform already in formation. Arms swinging loosely at their sides. Grim, eager grins and sassy eyes. Black robes flashing green and silver summer swag: new Pumas with glowing laces that screech like Peeves when they scrape the ground; striped knee socks; slashed jeans revealing holographic tights covered in Weird Sisters album art. At the peak of the pack, Pansy Parkinson, robes thrown back to reveal a boned bodice and a gliding tattoo snake that would both probably be confiscated as soon as McGonagall got her on school grounds, pursed her lips and locked eyes with Harry.

A long, breathless pause seized the platform. Harry felt a tiny trail of sweat run down his neck.

Malfoy screeched in from nowhere on a luggage cart melted into the silhouette of a giant snake, hit the ground with both feet, and snarled at Harry.

It was so. on.

Out of the corner of his eye as he shifted his weight and shook out his shoulders, relishing the way the blood rose in his face and veins, the tingle in his fingers and in his toes, his eyes darting back and forth between Pansy’s and Draco’s, his tongue licking his dry lips as one side of his mouth quirked up at them, daring them, Harry saw Molly Weasley throw her purse to the ground, hands suddenly full of angry-looking pom poms. He could feel Ron and Hermione just at arm’s reach, Ron scrambling into the patched shoes with the secretly charmed Voluphonic Tap Enhancers stitched into the soles, and Hermione weaving her shoulders from side to side and loosening the wand in her sleeve, unnerving Goyle with sudden rolls of her hips and drop-quick bends of the knee.

And now the battle. Malfoy dropped to his back and spun before Harry even had time to throw his feet through the zapateo of a spit-quick pasodoble. He countered with a _petit allegro_ that brought him within an inch of kicking the bleach-fair hair off his rival’s skull. Draco snatched his legs under him, back on his feet. Harry spun into a forward roll, ducked sideways through a split, and tossed in a double-triple time step for good measure—even if no one could hear his new Witching Hour Adidas, that he had saved for all summer, over the general shouting and taunting, the sudden echoes of competing Remembralls hacked to play the latest chart toppers, and especially the golden clatter of Ronald Weasley’s gorgeous taps.

The Patil sisters trapped Crabbe in such a quick swirl of fingers, elbows, chins, and knees that he lost his balance and sat suddenly on his own glittered bowler. Fred—though Harry wasn’t quite sure he understood the strategy—had his arms wrapped tight around a couple of Ravenclaws and appeared to be improvising some sort of three-way salsa, mostly by leading with his hips. Luckily Molly was too busy stunning Slytherin parents with her pom poms—they _were_ angry, it turned out—to notice her son’s less than technical innovations in social dance. George tumbled from the top of a human pyramid and pulled Pansy’s feet out from under her. She launched into a backflip and kicked him in the shoulder. As the seam of his jacket split, Wildfire Whiz-bangs poured out of some secret pocket, lighting the platform in snaps and pops of color, capturing the blur of Hermione’s arms as she zipped through a series of _foutés_ so fast they looked time-turned; Lee Jordan’s arms spelling YMCA from the coach window; the Coed Hufflepuff Rollerskate Darling Bridage doing their spiraling, body-checking worst; and finally, Harry rising triumphant from a bone-rattling knee slide, ragged breath in his throat, flushed and joyous and absolute king of the dance.

The Slytherin Dance Team had been scattered across the platform. Trails of silver and green glitter marked several falls. Draco Malfoy, despite having pulled off an unexpected and truly remarkable _penché arabesque_ while standing on the head of a Graham-contracted Goyle who kept shouting “choreography!” through gritted teeth, had been pushed back almost to the wall that led through to Platform 9. His hair was plastered to his forehead, his cheeks white with rage and the begrudging respect of the bested.

Harry raked back his own tousled hair, knowing how well the warmth of dancing and sparkle of movement became his emerald eyes, blinking through sweat behind his still-in-place glasses. “D’you have something to say to me, Malfoy?” he asked between huffs of breath, smiling and putting an index finger to the other boy’s chest. “Something about how the Triwizard B-boy Battle’s going to go down this year?” Malfoy exhaled through his nose and tried to cast disdain over his face, but he was breathing too hard for composure, his scarf somehow caught around an ankle, and the unraveled heels of his jeans catching at the rubber on his shoes. Harry couldn’t resist leaning in and looking him straight in the eye. “Maybe you wanted to tell me who’s going to get cast in the lead of Dumbledore’s big musical this year? Or maybe you just. thought.”—tapping his finger with each word on Malfoy’s sternum—“that you’d intimidate _my crew_ before the _Dragon Lake_ auditions.”

Malfoy gritted his teeth and twisted away. Even in his glow of glory, Harry had to appreciate his rival’s efficient use of muscular action, the compact ease with which he could slink around a corner or ooze each joint into place. The Slytherin Dance Team captain’s face had found its flush of rage at last. “This isn’t over, Potter. This isn’t over at all.”

Though the retort stung, Harry couldn’t help grinning. “Step up, Malfoy. You haven’t even seen what we can do.”

The Hogwarts Express whistle blasted, drowning out everything else. Parents ran for last-minute hugs and to re-assign parcels and owl cages that had been abandoned in the melee. Older students helped younger ones find their fringed batons and jackets. A few minutes later Harry, Hermione, and Ron were bundling into their favorite compartment shouting and laughing, reenacting their sharpest moments, impersonating Slytherins tripping over their own shoelaces (Ron), and thoughtfully diagramming a particularly stealthy do-si-do that had almost tossed her under the train (Hermione). “It might be dirty, but it’s still dancing!” she lectured Ron as she tapped her wand to record the sketch for future reference. Harry snuggled back into the plush seat and rolled his ankle to ease a cramp in his shin. He couldn’t stop smiling. Finally, he was going to cut loose.

**Author's Note:**

> Shameless references to and inspiration from Dirty Dancing, the Step Up movies, Bring It On, The Cutting Edge, Footloose, Center Stage, Fame, White Christmas, and all their glorious kin are here acknowledged.


End file.
